Mayakovsky in English Translation

Abstract

Translators, said Pushkin, are the posthorses of civilization. A culture renews itself through its translators, accepts what it can in the versions made available to it of other ways of thinking, feeling, and writing. Language itself will change under the pressure of a translated idiom. As far as English culture is concerned, this happened most notably in the Elizabethan period, and the list of Tudor translators who contributed to the English Renaissance would be very long indeed. If we, like Shakespeare, have accepted and absorbed Montaigne, for instance, it was thanks to John Florio, an Englishman from a naturalized Italian family, whose vibrantly idiosyncratic prose translates finesses verbales (for example) as 'verbal wily-beguilies'. If Ovid, then Golding, whose version of the Metamorphoses T. S. Eliot still quotes. Extraordinary things happened to Plutarch in North's English version of Amyot's French translation, and his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans contributed hugely to Shakespeare's political philosophy and even, in detail, to his poetry (Enobarbus's famous description of Cleopatra in her barge at Cydnus owes many images to North). We could go on and on, for Renaissance England was eager to absorb foreign learning of all kinds. And the neoclassical culture which followed was international in spirit, and to this spirit Pushkin in part belongs. Romanticism, however, takes a rather more complex view of translation, and this complexity is of necessity assimilated by modern theory. The Romantic doctrine of expressive form, and the high valuation placed upon creative individualism that went with it, combined into an organicist philosophy of unrepeatability, and therefore, essentially, of untranslatability, and this philosophy remains a powerful force in our time, however much it has been modified. Robert Frost, for example, famously defined poetry as 'what gets left out in translation'. Romantic practice coincides with Romantic theory to the extent that translation comes to be seen as a special case of what Goethe called 'elective affinities', whereby language speaks to language and text to text. Translation, especially of poetry, no longer transmits information by means of a simple source-text/ target-text model,